Laughing Gull Over the Ocean

Laughing Gull Over the Ocean / oil on black canvas / 5x7 unframed / $68 includes shipping

sold! 

I'VE BEEN SPENDING a lot of time and a lot of psychic and spiritual energy clearing out my home. 

I am deep in it - and finding that while the decisions are difficult, they are not as difficult as they were when I started. Part of that is that I am angry at the stuff itself - that it's a part of my life, that it is taking all this space and all this energy. I am angry that we hauled it all around for so long - and of course, I am angry that Peter is dead and that I'm doing all of this alone. But mostly, that's an afterthought. Mostly, I am mad at the stuff itself.

And this makes it easier to toss it. Even some of the hard stuff - a scrapbook of items from our honeymoon in France, for instance. Metro tokens from trips I don't remember, menus from restaurants I can't recall, bills from hotels where we stayed for one night or maybe five. I hadn't opened that scrapbook in 20 years, and when I opened it, I thought I couldn't possibly throw it away. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that tossing it was the right thing to do. And when I did, it felt great. It felt like relief. 

I will never forget our honeymoon. I will never forget the memorable restaurants, the hundreds of hours we walked through the streets of Paris, the photographs he took, the countryside we saw, the cathedrals we visited, the joy we shared at being together and being married. 

In the same way that Peter isn't IN the clothes that he bought, or IN the couch we put together, or IN the books he loved so much, he was not IN that scrapbook. He is in my heart, in my memories, in my soul. The stuff is just stuff - and needs to be gone. 

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For Today

"To be an artist is to believe in life." 

Henry Moore

Laughing Gull

Laughing Gull / oil on black canvas / 5x7 / $68 including shipping

I GREW UP WITH GULLS, but as far as I can remember, I never heard a laughing gull until we moved to Wachapreague. Even here, they don't laugh all year - though I think they are here for most of the year. 

Their name describes them pretty completely. Imagine a Wicked Witch of the West laugh, but in a gull's high-pitched voice, and you'll have it. It's a sound I love - and a sound that makes me laugh - and one that also can be annoying, if you're trying to do something, and failing at it. There are the gulls, laughing their heads off at you. 

They were some of Peter's favorite seabirds, and we always listened for their return, much as we listened for the start of the peepers in the earliest spring days, and the hum of the cicadas as summer reached and waned. 

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For Today

“My choice of color is dictated by tact and decorum stretched by an unholy desire to be outrageous. I’m trying to get color to the danger point where it’s too sweet or too noisy without actually making it too sweet or too noisy.”  

- Wolf Kahn